


Clipped Wings

by Trash



Category: Linkin Park
Genre: Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-04-12
Updated: 2004-04-12
Packaged: 2018-01-01 07:17:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1041955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trash/pseuds/Trash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chester has scars on his back. Where his wings were.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Clipped Wings

“Chester has scars on his back.” Mike said casually one day whilst Brad strummed clumsily at his guitar and Mike doodled in his note pad.

“Oh yeah?” Brad didn’t think Mike should be telling him this but he sat up and listened anyway.

“Yeah. On his shoulder blades; where his wings were.” Mike never lifted his head and continued scribbling at his paper with his half-chewed biro.

“Wings?” Brad thought it must be something Joe put him up to because everyone knows that Joe’s out of his tree. He put his guitar down at his feet and stared directly at the emcee until Mike raised his gaze and their eyes locked.

“Yes, Brad; wings.”

Brad thought, just for a second, what kind of wings. But he shook his head in disbelief. “You’re shitting me, right?”

Mike simply shook his head. “Nope.” He murmured and kept on drawing. “He showed them to me.”

“When?”

“Last night. He said he had something to show me and that he had been waiting to for a while.” Mike smiled fondly at the memory.

Brad frowned, “But you guys have been together for...”

“Four months.”

“Four months, yeah. Well, you guys have been together for four months and you’ve never seen them before?” Brad frowned again, eyebrows knitting together. The idea that his best friend had once had wings wasn’t registering in his mind.

“We undress with the lights off, and he’s always on his back.” Mike smirked, knowing that was far too much information for Brad. The guitarist was blushing furiously, his mouth opening and closing randomly.

“B-but he always has h-his sh-shirt off on st-stage.” Brad stammered, stumbling over his words whilst trying to encourage the blush to leave his face.

“You can’t see them for the tattoos You have to look closely, or run your fingers over his shoulder blades.”

***

Mike never spoke of Chester’s scars to Brad again after that. It remained a mystery to the guitarist as to why his friend had felt the need to tell him in the first place. But after their little talk, Brad found himself standing upstage of Chester so he could get a good look of the singer’s back. Part of him still thought that Mike was lying. People don’t have wings. It doesn’t happen.

But Brad finally managed to catch a glimpse of Chester’s scars when the singer was scrubbing angrily at his post-shower mess of hair.

When Mike said scars, Brad had expected angry purple markings; but all he could see were two silvery lines, raised slightly from the rest of Chester’s skin. They started just over either shoulder and ran down, sloping inwards towards his spine and stopping just above the line signifying where his ribs ended.

Knowing that Chester hadn’t seen him, Brad grabbed Joe’s posh new digital camera from the DJ’s bunk and snapped a lopsided candid photo of the singer’s back, catching the flustered look on his face in the mirror.

He told Mike, later, about how he’d seen the scars and felt impelled to photograph them. Mike sighed with a slight smile on his face, “You wont be able to see them when the photo is developed.” He said.

Brad cocked his head to the side. “How come?”

“I don’t know. I’ve tried before, but all I could see were the tattoos.”

“Where did the scars come from, really?” Brad asked. They were sitting at the table at the front of the bus and Mike was staring out of the window, watching the white lines on the road flash by them.

“His wings. I told you, Brad.” He glanced up and gave his friend a warning look. “You don’t have to believe me, but it’s truth.”

Brad shrugged and spread his fingers out flat on the table. “So he could like, fly and shit?”

Mike turned to stare out the window again. “He can’t remember. All he knows is his dad took them.”

“His dad?”

“Yes, Bradford, his dad. He says he can remember always having them but then one day his dad clipped them.” He sipped absently at the can of soda in front of him before returning his gaze to the road. “He can’t remember ever flying with them, but he thinks he could have if he wanted to. Even though he never used them he knew that, some day if things got bad, he could fly away. They were his freedom. Then one day is dad clipped them.”

“Shit.” Brad muttered under his breath. Nobody in the band particularly liked Chester’s dad after Chester plucked up the courage to tell them all what had happened to him when he was a kid.

“Chester can remember that they were beautiful and he said that they might have been feathery but he isn’t sure. He said that, once they were clipped, they were pointless and they became great ugly masses on his back.”

Brad kept his mouth shut and held back the urge to say his halo got too heavy?

“He used to show them off.” Mike chuckled lightly. “Surprise surprise, huh? He’d flash them off to the kids in his street and let them touch them. But once they were clipped he was ashamed of them, because they were so useless and so ugly to him.”

“He cut them off.” Brad stated.

Mike nodded sadly. “He said that, if his father had wanted to ruin his life, he had. He said that his wings were the only thing that gave him hope. He knew that he could fly away and be safe if his father hurt him too much but now he didn’t even have that.” Brad swore he saw a single tear run down Mike’s face and drip onto the table top slowly. “He…I know he misses them now.” Mike nodded to himself. “He said it hurt when he got his friend to cut them off. So he did a line to numb the pain.”

It was then, for Brad, that everything seemed to fall into place.

“I asked him, once, if he was an angel.” Mike smirked, eyes meeting Brad’s for just a second. “But he said he can’t ever remember falling.”


End file.
